The discussion with your prospective client has gone well. You’ve listened actively, asked all the right questions, taken a good client brief, showed you understand his objectives, presented your USPs, and illustrated how and why you are the best professional to solve his problem. The client is interested in your services and enthused by the manner in which you propose to tackle the project.

The signals are all green. You’ve achieved precommitment.

Don’t let them turn orange.

High added value services, convincing fees

Let’s face it. It’s rare for a prospect to hear a fee proposal and accept it without blinking — regardless of your rate.  (Should that happen, start to worry: either you’ve sold yourself short, you’ve missed a key component in the project’s detailed specs, or the client is a poor business person.) A prospect will strive to get you to lower your rate or to get more for less. It’s a predictable phase in the negotiation process and you’re prepared to exchange a few concessions. Successful negotiations are reciprocal, each party walks away with something. The “giving up” is balanced.

Facing a monkey wrench

What happens, though, when the music stops and there is no choreographed dance? What do you do if the prospect states flatly “your rate is too high” or turns silent, putting the onus on you?

How do you typically react? Do you try to prove your rate is in line with the service offered? Do you try to convince your prospect again of the benefits of working with you, running the risk of overselling? Do you get a tad defensive, explaining how hard the job is, the time it is going to take you to accomplish it?

Make friends with silence

Most of us are ill at ease in the face of silence or in being silent ourselves. It triggers anxiety, discomfort, fear or guilt. Rarely does it feel natural or comfortable.

In a fee negotiation, striving to fill the silence is rarely a winning tactic: it dilutes your message, distracts both parties from paying attention to the key issues that brought you together and weakens your credibility.

As Mahatma Gandhi said: “The more efficient a force is, the more silent and the more subtle it is.” Try to remain confident and quiet, let the prospect break the silence.

Three possible outcomes

1. The prospect commits. You’ve won the negotiation hands down. It’s smart then for you to reward your new client in some way.
2. The prospect offers a compromise. The discussion is reopened on more balanced grounds, it’s up to you to show goodwill if the prospect’s suggestion is reasonable.
3. The prospect walks away, the negotiation is closed. Don’t regret losing the project, the conditions for winning it would not have served you well. And sometimes, prospects do come back.

Remember, if you sell yourself short, the prospect may worry you’ll sell him short.

In yesterday’s post, Nobody Knows What You’re Talking About, Mitch argues that we know what we do so well that we have a hard time explaining it clearly to others.

And “others” aren’t just clients and prospects.

“Others” = everyone you come across since, as we all know, referrals are the single best way to land new business.

Can you type this in [foreign language] for me?
Folks, if you can’t explain what you do well,
how can you market your expert skills
and bill what they are worth?

Easy question, right? Such a ubiquitous tool in our lives, everyone knows what it is, ya’think? Surprise:

YouTube – What Is A Browser?…

In three sentences or less, what do you tell people you do?

Don’t get me wrong, I am strongly in favor of independent professionals charging professional rates commensurate with the level and quality of service rendered to clients.

The New Year “cost of living adjustment” rate increase reflex is perplexing for several reasons:

1. It’s predictable and, as Simon Turner underscored in his presentation at the SFT’s Journée mondiale de la traduction in December 2009, it is counter-intuitive from a marketing standpoint. Building client loyalty is even more important than getting a rate increase from January 1. It’s a smarter move to announce a rate increase, but tell your clients that ,*for them*, it will only be applicable say from June 1. He has a few other tactics up his sleeve that make this (small) discount pay off even more.

2.  2009 inflation rates in the US, Euro zone and Japan, for example, were modest or negative: 0.5 % in the Euro area, 1.8% in the US,  and - 1.9% in Japan.  A cost of living rate increase per word three digits after the decimal point hardly seems worth bothering clients about.  Say you charge 0,20 cents per word and increase your rate by 1.8%, your rate adjustment is 0,0036 cent.

3. Also, if you use inflation to legitimize rate increases to clients, then clients should also expect rate cuts in line with negative inflation.

Two suggestions:

As a buyer of professional services, I’d be annoyed if my suppliers took up my time to announce absurdly small rate increases. Also, this would tell me these professionals:

a) Take a unit cost approach, rather than an added value approach, and

b) Are not making the best use of *their* time.

Rate increases are worth discussing with clients when they represent a measurable shift. Moving from 0,20 to 0, 2036 is not worth the stamp, phone call, e-mail, time. Moving from 0,20 to 0, 22 or more is.

Explaining that increase changes the conversation with clients and the professional’s positioning. Your years of experience, continuous professional development, investment in resources and expanded scope of services, to name a few and all of which provide noticeable added value to clients, are worth much more than just a cost of living increase.

Taking a consultant’s approach is another way to focus on service rather than price.  Incremental cost of living rate increases suggest that translators work on a fixed-rate basis, regardless of the unit count used (source words, target words, hours) – whether that fixed-rate is of a “one-sized fits all” variety or further refined to consider specialization, format, urgency, night or weekend surcharges and so on.

In my mind, this prevents the professional translator from being able to link the value of the service he/she provides with the effort (read time, expertise, tools) needed to provide that service *at a given time*, and to call on extra resources as may be required for the project’s complete success.

I can hear some of the objections as I write: “But we have set rates for various scenarios, which cover various types of projects, formats and deadlines.”

Maybe. But at some point:

• You’ll undersell yourself (not fair)
• You’ll overcharge your client (not fair either)
• Or you’ll have a set of announced rates (to increase them, they have to be announced, right?) that could lead you to fall into a full dancer’s split hard to explain to some clients.

Not having a set rate is one reason I rarely work with agencies: many (if not most large ones) expect translators to commit to a set rate for at least a year (often more) regardless of the project commissioned and regardless of foreign exchange rates. Yet each project is different, each client’s needs and goals are distinct, each project’s impact is specific – which is part of what makes this profession so interesting.

Does this mean I charge whatever my mood feels like on a given day? Of course not. I have a “drop-dead” rate under which I will not accept a project, regardless (or I take it on pro bono or in exchange of services).  But I have found over the years that it is preferable to estimate a project – once I have all the needed information – on a fee basis (even if I then convert it into the client’s desired unit, as the case may be, such as source work, target word, hour, “feuillet”…) because that proves to be most sensible and fair to all parties involved.

Independent professionals don’t have gobs of free time. Many already struggle with work/life balance issues; one of my colleagues, a French to English medical translator, often Skypes me grumbling “Gawd, it’s WDWEWDWE again!” – meaning her husband is hovering over her desk asking when and what is for dinner while she’s on a deadline. Mine occasionally quips I’m married to my computer more than to him.

Many freelancers participate in forums and discussion lists, finding substitutes for the office environment we lack, asking for help and advice, staying abreast of what is going on in our chosen profession, and of course marketing. You get out what you put in, it is important to contribute regularly.

How and when you visit and respond is up to you. The time invested is manageable, and if you’re off-line a few days because you are up to your ears in work, it’s not a big deal. I contribute regularly to about 3 or 4 forums, and occasionally to a couple more. It takes me a few minutes to about an hour a day. That works, it fits in.

As a self-confessed technophile and information junkie, social media attract me as much as a box of chocolates from Christian Constant (if you don’t know this chocolatier, check him out).

For a long time, I stayed on the sidelines, with an inactive blog, a small presence on LinkedIn and an even smaller one on Viadeo. I read a lot, I remained largely silent. Shyness was, I must admit, the main reason. Many don’t comment on blogs they read for that very reason. Please don’t be shy, bloggers love for readers to comment!

This summer, after redesigning my website, I gave myself a swift kick in the okol’e (hawai’ian word for your behind) and prepared a modest professional social media plan: redesign and revive the blog, commit to posting at least twice a week, get my nerve up to comment on others’ blogs, and start to make better use of LinkedIn.

And I’ve been doing that, and enjoying it! It is a bigger time commitment than mere participation on forums, but I still have control over when these activities take place. They do not interrupt my work – translators and copywriters’ work needs concentration and quiet! – and the process of writing blog posts like this one, surprisingly, increases my concentration skills.

Admittedly, my nights have become significantly shorter…

I’d put off joining Twitter until the small lull that hits the mid-November legal holidays in France. I joined with two clear goals in mind: drive traffic to my blog and have links to interesting blog posts and articles delivered to me without spending time looking for them.

After 24 little hours since my first “tweet”, I can sense how the time-concentration issue may spin out. Real-time social media is meant to be used…in real time, if you want to be serious about it and get the benefits you seek from it. TweetDeck is chirping at me every few minutes and even if I limit my curiosity to a cursory look at the maximum 140 characters in the tweet, my concentration nosedives. And tweeting constructively means more than just posting about your new blog post (which I will do in a few minutes) or that the weather’s turned nasty (it hasn’t).

As Billing Time’s chorus (in my book, the national anthem of all intellectual service providers) repeats, “my mind and my time are my merchandise.” I can see how Twitter can become habit-forming; I don’t know yet if it will be useful professionally. I am marginally comfortable with its inherent contradiction: increased connectivity to others, but in an increasingly deconnected way (language included). I do think I’ll have to schedule Tweet Time like dog walks and coffee breaks.

I’d like to hear from translators and freelancers who leverage all these various forms of on-line marketing and networking for business purposes. How and where do you ventilate your “2.0 time”? What tips can you share to preserve work-life balance? Are there social media you’ve tried and abandoned and why?